Colonialism and Property Theme Analysis

As a work of post-colonial literature—literature that counteracts earlier literary depictions of colonialism as noble and just—Remembering Babylon suggests that the Commonwealth settlers’ claims to land lived in by Aboriginal Australians for countless of years are baseless and absurd. Although the settlers in the novel insist that the land belongs to them by right of law, the superficial nature of legal borders suggests that such colonial claims are groundless and artificially constructed; the settlers’ right to the land exists only in their own minds.

The settlers jealously defend the boundaries of their land, demonstrating their belief in their exclusive rights as colonialists to possess property in the bush. Although none of the settlers was born in Australia, and although each family owns more property than they can reasonably manage, many of the settlers are fixated on making sure that no one trespasses on their property, especially after Gemmy begins living in the settlement. Even to Jock, this seems absurd: “Barney, in his anxious way, was forever out there pacing the line and looking for signs of trespass; except that there was no line, and the trespass too might be no more than a shadow on Barney’s thoughts, and how could you deal with that?” Barney’s anxious insistence that no one step on his land typifies the settlers’ fixation on land ownership and on excluding other people from even passing over it. In the minds of the settlers, their land belongs exclusively to them because “six hundred miles away, in the Lands Office in Brisbane, this bit of country had a name set against it on a numbered document, and a line drawn that was empowered with all the authority of the Law.” The Law, referring to the Commonwealth Law, is itself a rather arbitrary force in such an isolated place as the settlement. This “numbered document” has little authority out in the wilderness hundreds of miles away, as the settlers to stake out their boundaries and attempt to enforce them through violence.

However, the Aboriginal Australians’ general disregard for white claims of property ownership or fences suggests that in their eyes, such notions of ownership are absurd, present only in the minds of the newly arrived white settlers. Although the settlers might hold their borders with confidence and threaten violence against trespassers, even they realize that such borders and boundaries mean nothing to the indigenous peoples, who are “forever encroaching on boundaries that could be insisted on by daylight—a good shotgun saw to that—but in the dark hours, when you no longer stood there as a living marker with all the glow of the white man’s authority about you, reverted to being a creek bed or ridge of granite like any other.” The fact that the night can so easily turn legal boundaries into simple components wild bush land suggests that the settlers’ conception of land ownership is inherently flimsy, rooted only in the perception of Commonwealth authority. The settlers’ claims to the land do not account for the nomadic Aboriginal Australians who have lived in and crossed over those lands for generations, long before the white settlers ever arrived.

Furthermore, though the settlers are frustrated that the Aboriginal Australians do not respect their borders, Gemmy reveals that the Aboriginal people do not view the landscape in the same manner as the settlers. Where the settlers see borders, fences, and claims, Gemmy and the Aboriginal people see only spirits and navigational markers, those things which allow them to safely traverse the wilderness. As a group who constantly moves, there is no reason for the Aboriginal people to claim a particular plot of land and forbid others from entering it. The Aboriginal Australians’ disregard for Commonwealth property claims is further demonstrated by the fact that Gemmy often sees the Aboriginal tribesmen traveling on or near the settlers’ property while he is teaching Mr. Frazer about plants, though they easily keep themselves hidden from the settlers’ view. Such disregard suggests yet again that they have no regard for the white settlers’ new claims to ownership of land that Aboriginal people have walked on for generations.

The white people’s ideas of land ownership—which overrule, in their minds, the Aboriginal Australians’ rights to the land—are essentially the basis of colonialism. Accordingly, the invalidity of these ideas suggests that colonialism as a whole is groundless, particularly when it infringes on the rights of the people who already live in the place being colonized. In the settlers’ minds, they are acting on behalf of the British Commonwealth and the law it upholds. But for the Aboriginal community who has lived in the Australian wilderness for generations, such a law is meaningless; there is no reason for them to respect it.

The author himself is white, and the novel does not depict the settlers as purely evil invaders. Nonetheless, the story ultimately does characterize their colonialist ideas as unjustifiable, reinforcing the novel’s post-colonial perspective.